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The Best Way to Rate Photos on a NAS

By Ingo D ·

Your NAS holds years of work. Wedding galleries, travel shoots, client deliverables. The storage is solid, the redundancy is configured, the backups are running. And yet the simplest action a working photographer performs every day, assigning a star rating to a frame, still has no good answer on a NAS.

You can browse folders. You can see thumbnails. But you cannot swipe through a shoot at speed, mark keepers with a gesture, or apply colour labels. The NAS is a brilliant vault. It has never been a rating tool.

Why does rating photos directly on a NAS matter?

Photographers who store libraries on a NAS (and that is most working photographers with more than a few terabytes of RAWs) face a recurring friction: the rating step. You want to rate images where they already live. You do not want to copy a folder to a laptop, import it into Lightroom, rate there, export metadata, and somehow merge that back to the NAS. That round-trip consumes hours. It introduces version confusion. It ties you to a desk.

Rating directly on the NAS means your metadata stays with your originals from the moment you first look at a shoot. When you open Lightroom or Capture One later, the ratings are already in place. The question is: what tool do you use to rate them?

What are the best options for rating photos on a NAS?

Finder or File Explorer. You can scroll through thumbnails, but you cannot rate. You cannot flag. You cannot filter by rating later. It is a file browser, not a review tool.

The Synology Photos web UI. You can view images. You cannot assign star ratings. You cannot reject frames. The interface loads one image at a time, like a file browser, not a culling deck. It is not built for speed.

Lightroom or Capture One, connected to the NAS. You can map a network drive and import from it, but now you are back to the import-everything bottleneck. Lightroom works best with local storage. Culling over a network through a catalogue interface is sluggish. And the ratings live in the catalogue first; getting them back to the NAS as XMP sidecars requires an explicit export step.

A dedicated rating app that works directly on the NAS. This is the category CullKit occupies. The app connects to the NAS directly via SMB (or the Synology Photos API for Synology), reads the files at their native location, and writes star ratings, flags, colour labels, and tags directly alongside them as XMP sidecars. No import. No catalogue. No round-trip.

CullKit is an independent product. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Synology Inc., QNAP Technologies, Inc., TrueNAS / iXsystems, UGREEN Group, or their parent companies. It connects to NAS devices via standard protocols, the same way any other SMB client does.

How to set up a rating workflow on your NAS

Step 1: Connect to your NAS. Open CullKit and enter your NAS address. For Synology, you can use QuickConnect ID, local IP, or Bonjour auto-discovery. For QNAP, TrueNAS, or UGREEN, enter the SMB share path (something like smb://192.168.1.x/photos). The connection is stored securely in your device Keychain for subsequent sessions. You can also use the Synology Photos API to browse Personal Space, Shared Space, and Albums directly.

Step 2: Browse your library. Navigate your folder structure, albums, or shared spaces. The photo grid is responsive: pinch to zoom out for an overview, zoom in for closer inspection. Thumbnails show rating overlays and colour-label dots, so previously rated folders are visually distinct before you even open them.

Step 3: Open a culling session. Select a folder and start a culling session. You can choose to review all frames, unrated frames only, or frames matching a filter (minimum rating, colour label, tag). The session opens in full-screen, with nothing on screen but the image and the rating controls.

Step 4: Rate with gestures or keys. On iPhone and iPad, swipe right to keep, swipe left to reject. Tap a star icon for a 1-to-5 rating. The quick-access bar at the bottom provides colour labels (the Lightroom palette) and tags. On Mac, the keyboard drives the workflow: number keys for star ratings, P to pick, X to reject, 0 to clear, arrow keys to navigate. Auto-advance moves you to the next frame after each action, so your thumb or finger never needs to leave the rating zone.

Step 5: Write the ratings. After the session, CullKit writes your ratings to XMP sidecars stored alongside each RAW file on the NAS. RAW and JPEG pairs share a single sidecar, following the Lightroom convention. You can also choose to embed metadata directly in supported formats.

Step 6: Open your editor. Launch Lightroom, Capture One, or Darktable. Import the folder, or synchronise an existing import. Your star ratings, reject flags, and colour labels are already there. Your editor inherits your culling decisions automatically.

What makes rating directly on the NAS faster?

Speed comes from removing steps, not from moving faster through the same steps. The traditional workflow has five steps: copy to laptop, import to Lightroom, rate in Lightroom, export XMP sidecars, copy sidecars back to NAS. The CullKit workflow has two: rate on the NAS, open your editor. The three missing steps are the time you save.

The interface is also built specifically for the rating decision. Lightroom is a full editing suite; its Library module is one of many modules. CullKit does one thing: present the image, let you decide, move on. No panels. No sliders. No catalogue management. Just the frame and the rating action.

Are my photos uploaded anywhere?

No. CullKit processes everything locally on your device. Your photos never leave your network. Ratings are written directly to your NAS, to your drives, in folders you control. There is no cloud intermediary, no third-party server, no account that stores your metadata. For photographers who chose a NAS specifically to own their data, this is the only model that makes sense. (More on this in the privacy FAQ.)

What rating metadata can I actually set?

CullKit isn’t limited to a single star value per frame. A complete rating pass can record:

  • Star ratings (1–5) — the universal currency of culling, read by every major editor.
  • Pick / reject flags — the fast binary keep-or-discard decision, mapped to Lightroom’s pick and reject flags.
  • Colour labels — the full Lightroom palette (red, yellow, green, blue, purple), useful for grouping by scene, subject, or delivery batch.
  • Tags / keywords — written into the sidecar so they’re searchable in your editor later.

All four travel in the same XMP sidecar, so a frame rated 5 stars, flagged as a pick, labelled green, and tagged “ceremony” arrives in Lightroom with every one of those attributes intact.

Does NAS rating work with RAW and RAW+JPEG pairs?

Yes, and the pairing behaviour matters. Many photographers shoot RAW+JPEG simultaneously, which means every frame exists twice on the NAS. CullKit groups the same-name RAW and JPEG into a single reviewable frame and writes one shared sidecar, following the Lightroom convention — so you rate the shot once, not twice, and your editor doesn’t show you duplicates. RAW formats from the major camera systems are supported, alongside HEIC, JPEG, common video formats, and Live Photos.

Which NAS brands does this work with?

Because CullKit connects over standard SMB, it works with effectively any NAS that exposes a file share — Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (CORE and SCALE), UGREEN, Asustor, Terramaster, and others. Synology owners get a second option: a direct Synology Photos API connection that browses Personal Space, Shared Space, and Albums. The rating workflow, the XMP sidecar output, and the editor handoff are identical regardless of brand — only the connection address differs. If your NAS shows up in Finder or File Explorer over the network, CullKit can rate the photos on it.

Troubleshooting NAS rating

  • Ratings aren’t appearing in Lightroom. Confirm the session finished so sidecars were written, then run Library → Read Metadata from Files on the folder.
  • The NAS connects but folders are empty. Your account may lack read permission on that specific share — check the share permissions in your NAS control panel.
  • Thumbnails show no rating overlays after a session. Re-open the folder to refresh; CullKit shows rating and colour-label overlays on previously rated frames.
  • RAW previews are slow. Full-resolution previews stream over the network and resolve progressively; a wired or 5GHz connection helps with large files.

Getting started

CullKit runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac (Apple platforms only). The free tier lets you browse any connected NAS library. The Pro tier (7-day free trial, then monthly or yearly) unlocks culling, star ratings, colour labels, tags, XMP sidecar writing, and folder organisation.

A built-in demo mode with seeded sample data lets you try the full rating workflow before connecting your own NAS.

Download CullKit on the App Store

CullKit is an independent product. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Synology Inc., QNAP Technologies, Inc., TrueNAS / iXsystems, UGREEN Group, or their parent companies.

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